0

Somewhat related to my previous question, I'd like to slightly widen two parts of an uppercase M. Here's what I mean.

Default M:

enter image description here

Desired output

enter image description here

I know, the difference is minimal. Ideally the two lines should be widen by the same amount, whereas in my modified example I over-widened the vertical one, making it too thick.

Is this possible to do within LaTeX or should I look into software more specified to this task, say Adobe Illustrator?

I think the trickiest part is making the vertical line look as it should, i.e. in the two points (TeXnically four) where the line meets the top and the bottom of the M there's shouldn't be any rough angles.

To say this in more complicated words, the derivative should be continuous :)

Martin Scharrer
  • 262,582
noibe
  • 2,084
  • 1
    The Computer Modern fonts are open-source, so you can simply adjust the MetaFont source to your liking and generate a new font from it. https://ctan.org/pkg/cm – Henri Menke Feb 14 '19 at 01:09
  • Would you consider something like \documentclass{article} \usepackage[outline]{contour} \begin{document} \bgroup\contourlength{0.001em}\contour{black}{M}M\egroup \end{document} as cheating? –  Feb 14 '19 at 01:12
  • @HenriMenke That's currently beyond my skills, which means if I were to go that road I'd first have to teach myself how, then do it. It's definitely doable, but it seems like a lot of effort just to make two lines a bit wider. – noibe Feb 14 '19 at 01:16
  • @marmot Yeah, I would ;) – noibe Feb 14 '19 at 01:17
  • there are literally thousands of fonts available, can you not find one that you like rather than trying to patch one that you don't like? – David Carlisle Feb 14 '19 at 10:36

1 Answers1

3

latex is not a font design program so really the design of the letters is not a tex issue at all. To TeX, every character is a rectangle: the only information tex has a about a character is the four lengths: height, width, depth, italic correction. (You may be able to access the stroke paths in the back end or dvi driver but not from the tex macro side of the system.)

To modify metafont fonts you should adjust their metafont source, and to modify an OpenType font you should use a font editing tool such as fontforge.

David Carlisle
  • 757,742